VA Awards $111.9 Million in Veteran Suicide Prevention Grants to 191 Groups

The Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded $111.9 million in grants to 191 community organizations that provide suicide prevention services to veterans, the agency announced on September 29, 2026. The money flows through the Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program and becomes available at the start of fiscal year 2027.

The awards go to nonprofits, state and local governments, federally recognized tribes and other community-based organizations that have shown they can reach veterans. Payouts are distributed across the country in state-sized blocks: $7.5 million for 15 organizations in Texas, $3.8 million for nine in Alabama, $2.9 million for four in Montana, $1.975 million in Pennsylvania, $1.8 million in Wisconsin and roughly $700,000 for North Dakota, which officials there described as the state's first award under the program.

A grant program built to reach veterans outside the VA

The Fox program is named for a soldier who died by suicide in 2020 after leaving active duty, and its design reflects a persistent finding in VA's own mortality data. Sixty-one percent of veterans who died by suicide in 2023 — the most recent year with complete figures — were not receiving VA health care in the last year of their lives. A separate VA summary puts the same share of veterans as not having used VA care at any point in the two years before their deaths.

That gap is the program's reason for existing. Rather than hiring clinicians, the grants fund the organizations veterans already trust — food banks, faith groups, rural health centers, tribal programs — and pay for things like outreach, suicide prevention training and transportation to appointments.

"Community organizations are critical to reaching Veterans who may not otherwise connect with VA care," VA Secretary Doug Collins said in the announcement. "VA's Fox grant program often serves as a bridge between vital federal resources and vulnerable Veterans in need of help."

VA reported that Fox grantees served roughly 17,000 veterans, service members and family members in calendar year 2025, a 31 percent increase over 2024. The grants connected 344 at-risk veterans to emergency mental health care last year and linked 2,647 veterans who had never used Veterans Health Administration services to VA care and resources — nearly 1,000 more than in 2024.

The numbers behind the push

VA's 2025 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report counts 6,398 veterans who died by suicide in 2023. The department has made suicide prevention its stated top clinical priority, and the announcement catalogues the parallel efforts it points to as evidence of momentum.

Through September 20 of fiscal 2026, the Veterans Crisis Line answered more than 1.3 million calls, chats and texts, a 7.1 percent increase over the prior year, with a reported veteran satisfaction rate of 97.3 percent. VA said it completed more than 5.5 million suicide risk screenings through August 2026 under its RISK ID screening tool, about 100,000 more than in 2025, and that it has enrolled more than 280,000 veterans into care so far this year. Nearly 50,000 veterans have used the department's emergency suicide prevention benefit at VA or non-VA facilities since 2023, which covers acute crisis care for eligible veterans regardless of enrollment status.

Why the money matters more in some states than others

The distribution reflects the geography of veteran suicide risk, which runs higher in rural and western states with long distances to the nearest VA medical center. North Dakota's award, its first under the program, is aimed at expanding rural veterans' access to mental health care. Montana's four grantees split $2.9 million across a state with one of the highest per-capita veteran populations in the country.

The grants do not fund clinical treatment directly, and they do not expand the supply of psychiatrists, therapists or prescribers — the constraint that most often determines how quickly a veteran in crisis gets an appointment. What they buy is navigation: someone who calls, follows up, drives a veteran to an intake appointment and stays in contact afterward. For veterans with co-occurring post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use, that kind of sustained contact is often the difference between a referral on paper and actual treatment.

The awards land in the same week VA finalized new informed consent guidance for psychotropic medications, adding signature requirements for some prescriptions beginning in 2027. Both moves sit inside the administration's broader Great American Recovery Initiative, which has folded addiction and mental health programs into a single federal push while reorganizing the agencies that administer them. Whether the grant totals keep climbing depends on appropriations decisions that will not be settled until well after the fiscal year begins.